06 August 2019

Alien RPG - First session


I started the Alien RPG quickstart introductory adventure with Graham, Tom, Jag, Darren and Neil tonight as an online game using Roll20 and Discord for audio. It seemed to go well and we ended after 2 hours or so of play near the close of Act 1.

I've learned a lot about Roll20 this week. Using cards (having to build a deck), managing handouts and multiple pages for characters.

My mistakes I've noted so far:

  • - I handled tokens for characters wrong in Roll20, creating a lot of work for myself
  • - I forgot to upload the Chronus as a handout rather than a location page.
  • - I forgot the stunts table and interpolated the success levels. I'll nudge myself on that next time.
  • - I should have explained Story Points and their link to Personal Agendas at the start.

I still need to work out how to upload audio.

Biggest issue was Safari refusing to talk to the network as we started, so I ended up running Discord on my Chromebook and Roll20 in Safari on my Mac to ensure it was stable.

Great players, looking forward to the next session in September. The system from Fria Ligan is simple and effective.

Only one grating moment which was when I realised the quickstart describes Helium-3 as highly flammable; it's an asphyxiant, an inert gas and likely to cause cold burns when released from compression but it isn't flammable, which is painful in a hard SF game.

One thing I loved was the way the characters got stuck into day-to-day life on the ship, especially Tom's character doing the cooking and cleaning and bitching about management.

Now I need to double-down on the learnings as I have a full session to run this on Saturday at Playercon4 online.

6 August 2019

No comments:

Post a Comment